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The U.S. department store will begin installing VR stations in 90 stores to sell furniture to customers. This would be the largest VR roll-out in the history of retail. When Macy’s first opened their doors to the public in 1858 on the corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue in New York City, no one would

With the Gear VR’s launch in 2015, Samsung were technically the first company to release a modern-age consumer VR headset, and Gear VR is still the most owned VR headset on the market. In late 2017 they then launched a PC VR system, the Odyssey, the only ‘Windows Mixed Reality’ headset to use OLED panels and have lens separation adjustment.

Over the past year, there have been multiple hints from Samsung that their next step may be a standalone VR headset with AR capabilities- a “hybrid” so to speak.

In a recent interview with the Malaysian tech news outlet Lowyat.NET, the CEO of Samsung Electronics stated:

“Today, we are heavily looking into incorporating both VR and AR (Augmented Reality). We haven’t decided which route to go with this yet, but we’re working closely with our partners on this. I’ve tested a prototype headset that actually incorporates both VR and AR, and it really delivers a much better experience with that combination.”

This isn’t the first time Samsung officials have hinted at a future VR headset distinct from 3DoF Gear VR or PC-based Odyssey.

The Odyssey may be a stepping stone to a fully standalone Samsung VR headset.

At their annual developer conference in November of last year, a Samsung VP told the audience “We think the next mobile VR system would have inside-out positional tracking with 6DoF motion controllers.” He stated that this would be delivered with “global partnerships” that included Intel.

Then, in May of this year, a Samsung official told The Korea Times that they were working on “cordless and high-priced headsets supporting both VR and AR”, and interestingly then added that Microsoft had recently agreed to lower its royalties.

This may be the answer to a major question about a future Samsung standalone headset: what platform and store would it run? With the Gear VR, Samsung used Oculus’ mobile platform and store, however the relationship between these two companies is currently unclear. For example, Samsung even added Google Daydream support to their smartphones and are using Microsoft’s platform on PC. Then earlier this year, Oculus launched its own standalone in the Oculus Go and basically never mentioned the Gear VR at Oculus Connect 5.

Instead, Samsung could be making the first standalone Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headset (Windows Mixed Reality is currently a PC-only platform, similar to SteamVR). Samsung has not said whether this would use an x86 chip like a PC or an ARM based chip like a smartphone, however the mention of Intel as a partner last November may suggest the former. If this is the case, this may have been what prompted Intel to close their “Project Alloy”, which was a project to create a standalone x86 VR headset reference design for manufacturers to use. It would also make it compatible with existing WMR, rather than requiring developers to recompile for ARM. In fact, it could potentially even run apps built for minimum spec PCs with no changes at all.

From media hype to marketing talk, it’s easy to get lost in what’s really happening in XR. On one hand, the barriers to entry are dropping with every technological innovation and XR applications are making waves in enterprise.

On the other, perceived lack of mass consumer adoption is causing some to hold back their efforts, as the industry cautiously navigates the heightened expectations. In such uncertain times, the necessity for companies to understand where and when to invest their resources is becoming increasingly important.

So where are the investors putting their money? Where are the analysts seeing the demand? What do the numbers really tell us?

On Wednesday October 24, VRX hosts a webinar with investors and analysts from HP Tech Ventures, Boost VC and SuperData, to look at where the real opportunities and gaps are to exploit. Putting hype aside to focus on the market realities of immersive reality, the panel of experts will dive deep into the data to decipher what’s real, what’s hype and what the future of XR really looks like.

See full details and register for this free XR market opportunities webinar here

XR decision-makers around the world are pondering many of the same questions, which the webinar will explore – such as:

Where is the primary market demand for new XR tech, solutions and experiences?
Where’s the majority of investment going – and why?
What’s stopping XR advancing as quickly as it could be – and what opportunities does this provide?

Panelists on the webinar feature the people who dedicate their work to understanding where the smart money is going in XR and what real challenges and opportunities are facing the industry.

The financial services industry is far from the first thing that comes to mind when you think of VR, but Nebraska-based TD Ameritrade begs to differ with their first of a kind experience for Oculus Go.

At the firm’s conference in Last Vegas, the largest investor education conference in the industry, TD Ameritrade presented the experience to investors. It is a 360° video for Oculus Go accessed from the Oculus Video app, which gives the viewer an inside look into the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the Chicago Board Options Exchange (BOE), and Bitcoin, leveraging VR to make them feel truly present.

“Visualization is a powerful tool because it makes abstract things seem more real,” said Sunayna Tuteja, head of strategic partnerships and emerging technologies at TD Ameritrade in a prepared statement. “Finance is often abstract, and we’re excited to take first step in using the power of VR, combined with our expertise and knowledge, to further demystify the often complex topic of investing. We’re on a journey to break down more barriers to entry when it comes to investing in the markets, and this is one more way we can do that.”

While VR may appear at first to be a strange leap for TD Ameritrade, it is actually part of a larger strategy to expand investor education to as many technology platforms as they can. They already provide this service over Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Alexa, iMessage for Business, and in Hong Kong WeChat too.

It remains to be seen whether VR will become a regular format for TD Ameritrade or whether other brokerage firms will follow in their path, but what is clear is that VR can have many use cases beyond gaming and entertainment.

On top of your head there is a receiver with a USB cord on the back bringing power up from a battery pack clipped to your clothing. Packaged with a Vive Pro, this add-on is also heavy, bulky, expensive and gets warm on the top of your head from regular usage. And yet, I believe the Vive Pro with Vive Wireless Adapter is the best consumer VR experience on the market in 2018.

There are still technically a lot of wires involved with the Vive Wireless Adapter.

The “Vive Wireless Adapter” is $360 or so with the “additional attachment kit” required for Vive Pro on top of what is currently termed the “Vive Pro Starter Kit”, costing around $1,100. That’s two first generation SteamVR Tracking base stations, two controllers, the Vive Pro head-mounted display with integrated audio, WiGig card for your PC, WiGig antenna for your PC, receiver for the Vive Pro, battery pack for your side and an extra pad for the Vive Pro to keep the heat from the receiver away from your head. All that together costs around $1,500. Plus you’ll need a PC that likely costs at least $700 to render the virtual worlds for you to play or work inside. You can cut some money from this investment by going for a regular $500 Vive instead of the Pro, but you’re still looking at around $800 in dedicated VR equipment (not including the PC) to put a single person with hand controllers in an untethered virtual space.

Games like Beat Saber, Superhot, Creed VR and Space Pirate Trainer play better with the freedom of the Vive Wireless Adapter and Vive Pro than with any tethered headset I’ve tried, and yet we expect most or all of those games to play pretty well on the standalone Oculus Quest as well in 2019. Oculus Quest should cost only $400 per player for a similar (albeit less powerful) overall experience. This means if you skip getting a wireless Vive now in less than nine months you could buy at least two complete Oculus Quest systems for the same price.

No wires with the $400 standalone Oculus Quest — only safety straps for the controllers. Total cost of the three complete VR systems shown in this photo should be around $1,200 in 2019.

For a certain segment of our readers, their preference for PC as an open platform not tied to an account managed by Facebook is reason enough to never consider an Oculus-branded VR headset. And for those earlier adopters who’ve already made part of the investment in the Vive ecosystem or prefer to use a powerful PC at the core of their digital life — the wireless Vive Pro should provide the best VR experience of 2018, though we’ll admit to not having tried TPCast since CES at the start of this year.

Even so, the first takeaway here is that the best consumer VR experience available to buy in 2018 is way more

Oculus CTO John Carmack posted on Twitter to announce that the long running legal disputes between himself and Zenimax are now over, and that all claims between the two parties have been released.

The legal clash between Zenimax and Oculus first emerged in 2014, just after the Facebook acquisition of Oculus, when Zenimax filed a lawsuit claiming that Oculus used Carmack’s VR work created while working for Zenimax, and therefore the intellectual property of Zenimax, in order to develop the Rift. In fact, Zenimax claimed that an NDA that Palmer Luckey had signed as far back as 2012 would cover any of Carmack’s work.

In 2016, Zenimax expanded their complaint, alleging that John Carmack personally copied Zenimax code to a USB stick for use at Oculus on the Rift, and that Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe had assisted this theft by lying to the press about Palmer Luckey’s inventing skills.

The case was finally heard before a jury in early 2017, in which Zenimax asked for a total of $6 billion – $2 billion in compensation and $4 billion in damages. While the jury found that Palmer Luckey, Brenan Iribe, and Oculus violated the NDA, for which they had to pay $500 million, they also found that Carmack did not steal trade secrets as Zenimax had claimed.

My personal legal disputes are over — Zenimax has fully satisfied their obligations to me from the purchase of Id Software, and we have released all claims against each other. (The appeal for Oculus still goes forward)

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) October 11, 2018

As a response to Zenimax’s legal claims against him, last year Carmack decided to follow Zenimax up on $22.5 million that he claimed was still owed to him from the acquisition of id Software, which he co-founded in the 90’s. id Software produced many of the most significant games of that decade, including Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, and was acquired by Zenimax in 2009.

Now this month, Carmack has confirmed that this dispute between himself and Zenimax is over, but mentioned that the case between Zenimax and Oculus is still being appealed. It is uncertain how the Oculus appeal will develop, but we’ll keep you updated once any news emerges.